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Entertainment and Sports LawCopyrightsArtificial IntelligenceEntertainment Law & FinanceFeatures

Holes in U.S. Copyright Office’s Guidance for AI-Assisted Works

By Dallas Cire
December 01, 2025

AI-assisted artwork poses a simple question: When can an artist using AI tools copyright their work? Earlier this year, the Copyright Office addressed the issue and rejected the proposition that only prompting an AI model can create a copyrightable work: “The Office concludes that, given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output.” U.S. Copyright Office, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part II: Copyrightability 18 (2025) (“Copyright Report”).

But Copyright Office’s analysis missed that “randomness” for a computer means something entirely different than we generally think, ultimately underselling the amount of control someone can have over a model’s output. If an artist can get a copyright (albeit a thin one) based solely on edits and modifications to an image, then someone using an AI tool should be able to do the same.

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